[mattchachu]

I have a referbrished Power Mac G5. Apple kindly, and accidentally, gave me a 230 gig hard drive and a gig of ram.

I do a lot of video editing, its the reason I got a mac, and was considering creating a partition. I would seperate my video editing materials from my normal, everyday internet, word processor, etc. My main reason for the partition was so to avoid any kind of slowdown if I happen to have a very large video project going. Is the partition really necessary, or will the hard drive hold up anyway?

Thanks,
-Matt

[himself]

I'm no expert, but my understanding is that partitioning won't make anything any faster (or eliminate any slowdown), since it will still be one physical drive, after all. If anything, it may reduce perfomance. It will help with keeping your data separate and protected, but I think that's about it. I'm not sure how the drive will perform if you have a large video project working on one partition, while the other partition is under moderate to heavy use, but I guess it is fair to say it won't be optimal. It may or may not be enough for your purposes (what are the specs on that drive, by the way?).

In short, get a second (cheaper, smaller) drive for you apps and general purpose work, and reserve the bigger one for video. You'll get the maximum performance that way.

[bowwowman]

Agreed, use that big monster for the video & get a smaller SATA HD for the regular stuff..... Even though partitioning would not necessarily improve performance much, it would not hurt much either. In the old days, it would help reduce file fragmentation, but now that is mostly a memory with OS X....just remember to NOT put any other files on the video drive, keep it clean and it will handle all your movie tasks easily

[reader50]

You would get a real advantage to setting aside a scratch partition for video editing, assuming your video editing app supports this. The application's scratch file(s) would avoid fragmenting around normal files. Open files being appended to will fragment when they hit other files. This is different from saving out a complete file, where the final file size is known in advance, and the OS can select a contiguous free space large enough to fully contain the file.

If you mean another partition for storing your video documents and applications, there is no performance advantage to doing this.

[awcopus]

Originally posted by mattchachu:
I have a referbrished Power Mac G5. Apple kindly, and accidentally, gave me a 230 gig hard drive and a gig of ram.

I do a lot of video editing, its the reason I got a mac...

That's a nice surprise. Congrats.

As a rule, never put video or audio assets on the same drive as your boot drive. Scrubbing over timelines, compositing layers of AV, video editing in general is simply HD intensive. You want your boot drive isolated from all of this wear-and-tear.

Get a second drive (check out Hitachi's 400GB, Maxtor's 300GB) and, as others have advised, make it your dedicated AV assets location.

[Mac Write]

When I am forced to move to a G5/G6 tower in late 2006/mid 2007 and am constrained to two internal drive bays, I am going to get two Rapter 10K drives. one for OS/Apps and the other for scratch, then use an external firewire case with a couple drives as my data drives. This should really improve performance.

[awcopus]

Originally posted by Mac Write:
When I am forced to move to a G5/G6 tower in late 2006/mid 2007 and am constrained to two internal drive bays, I am going to get two Rapter 10K drives. one for OS/Apps and the other for scratch, then use an external firewire case with a couple drives as my data drives. This should really improve performance.

Consider the possibility of bypassing Firewire and using a SATA card from Sonnet plus a MacGurus SATA enclosure. You'll get far superior performance.

[jamil5454]

a Firewire800 multi-disk SCSI RAID enclosure would be the best solution, but unfortunately it would come at a premium price. Or, even better, build a cluster using Pooch or a RenderFarm would be the fastest thing. Yay!

[tooki]

Originally posted by reader50:
You would get a real advantage to setting aside a scratch partition for video editing, assuming your video editing app supports this. The application's scratch file(s) would avoid fragmenting around normal files. Open files being appended to will fragment when they hit other files. This is different from saving out a complete file, where the final file size is known in advance, and the OS can select a contiguous free space large enough to fully contain the file.

If you mean another partition for storing your video documents and applications, there is no performance advantage to doing this.

"Real advantage" from a separate drive yes. From a partition? No.

You're forcing the heads to have to swing back and forth between partitions. That, if anything, can reduce performance.

tooki